14 DAY TRIAL // Linus Torvalds just made his regular Sunday announcement to inform the community about the availability of the seventh and last Release Candidate (RC) development build of the forthcoming Linux 4.8 kernel series.
According to Linus Torvalds, Linux kernel 4.8 Release Candidate 7 is once again bigger in patches than he was expecting it to be. Last week, we reported that things were calming down and that this series would be a normal one with seven RCs, but it now looks like it won't happen, and one more RC release should come out next week, on September 25, 2016.
"Normally RC7 is the last in the series before the final release, but by now I'm pretty sure that this is going to be one of those releases that come with an RC8," says Linus Torvalds. "Things didn't calm down as much as I would have liked, there are still a few discussions going on, and it's just unlikely that I will feel like it's all good and ready for a final 4.8 next Sunday."
As for the changes included in the RC7 build of Linux kernel 4.8, we can notice various core networking fixes, the usual driver updates (this time for things like PCMCIA, NVMe, and RDMA), a bunch of improvements to some of the supported hardware architectures, as well as some KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) and perf fixes, along with the standard core kernel enhancements.
Linux kernel 4.8 lands October 2 with many goodies
Therefore, if you have nothing else better to do Sunday evening, and you want to help the Linux kernel developers patch as many issues as possible before the final release of the Linux 4.8 kernel series hits the streets in two weeks, on October 2, 2016, don't hesitate to download the source archive right now via our website or directly from kernel.org.
As usual, don't forget that this is a pre-release version of Linux kernel 4.8, which shouldn't be used in a production environment. Please install and test the seventh Release Candidate development milestone of the Linux 4.8 kernel series in a machine that you only use for testing purposes, and don't you ever replace your stable kernel packages with an unstable build.